Climate scientists fear Trump will dismantle tools of their trade

As federal scientists warn that 2016 set another record for global heat, a climate scientist in Austin worries that the tools and data used to study the climate might be at risk under the Donald Trump administration.

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Like other researchers, Kerry Cook, a University of Texas at Austin professor who has studied climate change for more than 30 years, relies on computer models and data shared by federal agencies, which will be overseen by Trump, who at one point called human-caused global warming “a hoax.”

“I believe there’s change, and I believe it goes up and it goes down, and it goes up again,” Trump said during a 2015 radio interview. Trump has also vowed to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement and the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan, which aimed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

Most federal climate science is overseen by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. On Wednesday, NOAA and NASA wrote that the Earth last year reached its highest temperature for the third year in a row, “driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.” El Niño also played a role.

One of Cook’s biggest concerns is the fate of climate information from the network of government weather stations and satellites.

“People are very worried about keeping funding going again for the observations,” she said. “We need a long, continuous, consistent time series.”

Trump’s pick for EPA administrator, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has sued the agency over climate change measures. At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Pruitt said he does not believe climate change is a hoax but cast doubt on its severity.

Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross is Trump’s pick to lead the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA. At his hearing, Ross said, “I believe science is science and scientists should perform science.”

Despite the reassurances, climate scientists were spooked last month when Trump’s transition team asked the Department of Energy for lists of federal employees who attended climate change conferences and worked on climate studies. The department refused, and the transition team later backed off.

Still, the story sparked an effort to save the data by scraping climate information from federal webpages and saving it on independent servers.

That Trump’s people asked for those lists, “just adds to the intimidation that’s already occurred,” said U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, “and it’s alarming.”

If Trump need allies in Congress to attack climate scientists, he will easily find one in U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio. As a climate change skeptic, he has used his position as science committee chairman to subpoena data and emails from NOAA scientists studying climate change.

“It’s very distracting for scientists to have to constantly (be) repeating the basic science and constantly (having) to advocate and defend science,” Cook said.

Smith’s staff originally agreed to an interview with The Express-News to discuss what the Trump administration’s policies might be but later canceled the interview, citing scheduling conflicts.

The climate research done by Cook and others proved useful on a local level in addition to a global one. For example, the Third National Climate Assessment in 2014 helped San Antonio in developing its SA Tomorrow Sustainability Plan.

In 2015, city staff hired a climate modeler who worked on that assessment to predict San Antonio’s climate by 2070.

By then, San Antonio’s sweltering summers are likely to get worse, with 15 to 28 more extremely hot days per year, depending on future carbon dioxide levels.